Month: May 2021

The Dark Side of Congo’s Cobalt Rush

In June, 2014, a man began digging into the soft red earth in the back yard of his house, on the outskirts of Kolwezi, a city in the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. As the man later told neighbors, he had intended to create a pit for a new toilet. About eight feet into the soil, his shovel hit a slab of gray rock that was streaked with black and punctuated with what looked like blobs of bright-turquoise mold. He had struck a seam of heterogenite, an ore that can be refined into cobalt, one of the elements used in lithium-ion batteries. Among other things, cobalt keeps the batteries, which power everything from cell phones to electric cars, from catching fire. As global demand for lithium-ion batteries has grown, so has the price of cobalt. The man suspected that his discovery would make him wealthy—if he could get it out of the ground before others did.

Turkey Under Fire Over Military Presence in Libya

International pressure is growing on Turkey over its military presence in Libya.

Turkey deployed hundreds of soldiers and thousands of Syrian fighters in support of the Libyan Government of National Accord in its battle against forces of Libya’s General Khalifa Hafta, who is backed by Russian and Sudanese mercenaries.

UN peacekeeper withdrawal leaves security vacuum in Darfur

The departure of the long-running UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur has created a security vacuum as hundreds of thousands flee fresh outbreaks of violence in a conflict that civil society groups and displaced Darfuris told The New Humanitarian is far from resolved.

The joint UN-African Union mission, known by its acronym UNAMID, had been gradually drawing down since 2018, but its mandate was terminated in December – after 13 years on the ground – amid pressure from Sudan’s civilian-military transitional government.

Many Darfuris believe the pullout has worsened the security situation, particularly in the conflict-hit town of El Geneina, where outbreaks of violence since January have cost hundreds of lives and exposed the weakness of Sudan’s security forces – now responsible for protecting civilians.

In interviews with The New Humanitarian, recently displaced people from other parts of Darfur also cited the pullout as a factor motivating their decision to leave home following attacks, while several women at displacement camps said they have stopped leaving the sites altogether since UNAMID patrols ended.

“The circumstances that put us here have not changed,” said Yaqoub Mohamed Abdallah, the leader of Kalma camp, one of the largest displacement sites in Darfur. “The withdrawal of UNAMID is going to have serious consequences.”

UNAMID began deploying to Darfur in 2007, around four years after rebel groups in the region revolted against the government of former leader Omar al-Bashir, who they accused of neglecting the western area.

Hundreds of thousands died as Khartoum-armed Arab militias known as the Janjaweed fought the largely non-Arab rebels in a campaign that triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, and earned al-Bashir an International Criminal Court indictment for genocide.

Darfuris often criticised UNAMID for failing to protect them over the years, though many felt it still deterred attacks and were grateful it bore witness – albeit imperfectly – to a conflict that al-Bashir’s regime wanted hidden.

While peacekeeping patrols have now ended, UN officials remain on the ground in Darfur to liquidate the operation, which was one of largest and costliest missions ever deployed.

The exit process has proved challenging. UNAMID bases and equipment handed over to authorities have been looted by militias, while Sudan’s government has been seeking control over mission assets intended for other peacekeeping forces.

“We have had difficulties at every step of the road,” Michael Tarallo, a senior UNAMID official involved in the drawdown process, told The New Humanitarian in March from a peacekeeping base in El Fasher, one of the largest towns in Darfur.

The end of the operation doesn’t mark the end of the UN’s engagement in Sudan, officials stress. A new political mission focused on assisting the country’s transition to democratic rule began work in January, and is currently setting up offices in Darfur.

However, the Khartoum-based mission, known as UNITAMS, has no mandate to physically protect civilians, and has been given less money and fewer staff than its predecessor, which once had an operating budget of more than $1 billion.

“It is a small mission with a broad mandate,” Volker Perthes, the head of UNITAMS, told The New Humanitarian in March in one of his first sit-down media interviews. “People shouldn’t compare us to UNAMID.”
‘Violence could have happened if UNAMID was here. But not on this scale.’

UNAMID’s ability to protect civilians was often hamstrung by al-Bashir’s regime, which intimidated and obstructed peacekeepers seeking access to sensitive spots, denied flight clearances for mission aircraft, and refused countless visas to staff members.

Former officials criticised the mission’s reluctance to call out the Sudanese government for frequent attacks against civilians, and against its own peacekeepers. Bureaucracies linked to its hybrid UN-African Union status also proved a hindrance.

Amid waning international support for the mission – and US pressure to cut the peacekeeping budget – UNAMID began drawing down its peacekeepers with a view to exiting in June 2020.

Though the mission was prolonged from June to December 2020, further extensions were ruled out by the transitional government, which includes military leaders who have long seen UNAMID as a threat to Sudan’s sovereignty.

Luke Mhlaba, UNAMID’s chief of staff and most senior remaining official, told The New Humanitarian the mission’s closure was necessary: “I don’t see UNAMID staying for another 20 years,” he told The New Humanitarian in El Fasher. “Ultimately, only the Sudanese can solve their problems.”

But the December decision was met with protests in displacement camps that are still dotted across Darfur, and was criticised by Sudanese rights groups and civil society organisations who say the root causes of conflict have not been addressed.

While large-scale conflict has receded, clashes between communities persist, rebel groups and Janjaweed-linked militias are still active, and at least 1.5 million people remain in camps.

Many believe the mission should have been extended to help implement a landmark peace agreement last year between the government and rebel groups – from Darfur and elsewhere – and to help provide a semblance of security through Sudan’s rocky transitional process.

“Nobody wants UNAMID to stay forever, but the timing is problematic,” said Abdalla Adam Khalid, the chancellor of Zalingei University in Darfur. “People in Darfur feel that the conflict is not yet settled.”

In UNAMID’s absence, the new peace agreement calls for the establishment of a national protection unit involving up to 20,000 troops. But timelines for creating it have slipped and many question how it will be afforded by Sudan’s cash-strapped government.

The idea for the force is also facing resistance from displaced communities because it includes members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a group formed from the remnants of the Janjaweed militias that caused so much devastation here.

RSF members have been implicated in the series of attacks in El Geneina that began in December 2019 – a few months after UNAMID closed its main base in the area – but have intensified since January 2021.

“[Violence] could have happened if UNAMID was here,” said Daud Ibrahim, a leader of displaced people in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state. “But not on this scale.”

Residents of displacement camps in other parts of Darfur also said the situation had deteriorated since December. In Kalma – a sprawling site in South Darfur state – community leaders said local militias have stepped up threats against them since UNAMID’s withdrawal.

Women who previously travelled outside Kalma for work said they have stopped doing so for fear of attack – a decision that has left some jobless. “UNAMID left so the militias can do bad things against us,” said Kaltuma Mohammed, a 30-year-old camp resident.

For residents of Kalma and other camps, UNAMID’s withdrawal means they have also lost more than just security: Many say the blue helmets symbolised that their plight still mattered, long after the world’s attention moved on.

“UNAMID was the way we could send a message to the international community,” said Musa Adam Musa, a community leader from Kalma. “[Now] there is nobody to complain to.”
‘They want all that we’ve got’

Though UNAMID has been reducing its troop numbers for the past few years – from almost 20,000 at its peak to 7,000 by December 2020 – liquidating the mission has proved challenging.

Sudan’s government expected a total withdrawal after the December decision, according to Tarallo, but uniformed and civilian staff still need repatriating and bases need closing – a job that will stretch into 2022.

Complicating matters is the issue of who gets UNAMID’s asset inventory – from computers to vehicles, generators to air conditioners. UN officials want some handed over to missions abroad; Sudan’s government has other ideas.

“They want all that we’ve got,” said Tarallo. “They have confiscated stuff from us. They want a list of all property being shipped.”

Meanwhile, some UNAMID bases handed over to Sudan’s government on the agreement they would be repurposed as courts, schools, and medical clinics have been taken over by members of the RSF.

Other bases given to the government – some worth millions of dollars – have also been looted, with video footage pointing to the involvement of security forces and the RSF, UNAMID officials told The New Humanitarian.

One of the worst incidents involved two weeks of looting in late 2019 at UNAMID’s South Darfur base. Among assets stripped were a hospital with operating theatres; a building earmarked for a local university; and a firing range the UN hoped would be used for Sudanese troops to train as future peacekeepers.

On a visit to the site in March, the vast compound lay abandoned, with the exception of a few camels grazing on overgrown grass and a group of Sudanese soldiers who soon turned The New Humanitarian’s reporting team away.
‘The question is whether it was worth it’

As well as peacekeeping activities, UNAMID spent tens of millions of dollars on peacebuilding projects ahead of its exit – from training civilians in human rights and conflict resolution, to rehabilitating rural courts and police stations.

Much of the recent work was done in partnership with other UN aid agencies, which UNAMID officials hope will continue to operate in Darfur long after they leave – though most expect a sharp drop-off in peacebuilding support is inevitable.

In a series of interviews with The New Humanitarian in El Fasher and Khartoum – conducted as liquidation efforts continued – UNAMID officials offered contrasting views of what the mission had achieved over the years.

Tarallo, the official involved in the drawdown, said obstacles put in place by the government under al-Bashir had badly compromised its mandate. “A lot of efforts were made. A lot of [peacekeepers] died,” he said. “The question is whether it was worth it.”

Mhlaba, the chief of staff, said the mission had had “a major impact” in protecting civilians since arriving. “Our mere presence had a deterrent effect,” he said. “I can’t quantify how many attacks we prevented, but the situation improved.”

In Kalma, where insecurity is rising, displaced people agreed that the mission had helped stabilise Darfur – particularly in camps like theirs – but not enough to justify the peacekeepers leaving.

“A doctor cannot just go before the patient recovers,” said Musa, the Kalma community leader. “We demand this mission stays until a comprehensive peace is achieved.”

Ethiopian region of Tigray at ‘serious risk’ of famine, warns top UN official

A senior United Nations official has warned the Security Council that urgent measures are needed to avoid famine in the war-torn region of Tigray in Ethiopia, in a briefing seen by AFP.

“There is a serious risk of famine if assistance is not scaled up in the next two months,” wrote Mark Lowcock, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

Biden’s Dangerous, Risk-Averse Inaction on North Korea

The Biden administration is using an outdated script to justify doing very little about North Korea. As a consequence, it’s blowing a unique opportunity to avoid a future crisis, stabilize the Korean Peninsula for the long term and rectify one of America’s longest-running foreign policy mistakes.

Pakistan Can’t Insulate Itself From Afghanistan’s Uncertain Future

As U.S. troops begin what may be their final withdrawal from Afghanistan, no third country will be affected by their departure as much as Pakistan, which shares a long, porous border with Afghanistan, hosts much of the Taliban leadership as well as millions of Afghan refugees, and faces threats from Pakistani militants based there.

For Pakistan, America has been both a partner and a strategic competitor in Afghanistan. Notionally, the U.S. exit presents Islamabad with an opportunity to proactively shape Kabul’s political future in its favor. But in reality, a post-withdrawal Afghanistan without an internationally backed, intra-Afghan accord offers far greater risks than rewards for Pakistan. An emboldened Taliban and a potential civil war next-door would not only jeopardize Islamabad’s dreams for regional connectivity, but also pose a threat to its own domestic security.
Managing the Superpower Next Door

For nearly two decades, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan across Pakistan’s northwestern border has been a problem for Islamabad—one it has sought and struggled to manage.

The Drawbacks of Biden’s ‘Competition With China’ Habit

In last week’s episode of “America Competing with a Rising China,” the geopolitical equivalent of a TV series, Joe Biden took the wheel of a Ford truck and all but burned rubber as he pulled away from reporters who had come to witness the stunt.

Biden’s visit came on the eve of Ford’s announcement of a new, all-electric version of its model F-150, the most popular motor vehicle in the United States, and he used it to enlist the automaker’s innovations in his ongoing campaign to prove not just that “America is Back,” whatever that means, but that the country can outcompete its biggest rival, China.

Invocations of China as a summons to a restoration of American greatness have been coming fast and furious under this president, who has also repeatedly wielded the specter of Chinese power to justify his policy priorities.

Beating China is the reason why the country needs huge new investments in infrastructure that go well beyond traditional definitions of that term. Outcompeting China and thereby supposedly “owning the future” is invoked as a leading motivation behind new climate change measures, including research into limiting carbon emissions. China is a driving factor behind both a return to the moon and an effort to break new ground on Mars. For many, China is also the reason to step up faltering efforts to increase access to COVID-19 vaccines around the world—not the impact of the disease itself.

So widespread is the use of China as the competitive rationale or excuse cited for this thing or the other these days that one could go on almost endlessly in this vein. But any reader who follows the news will have already gotten the idea.

What if this approach to formulating policy rationales was mostly wrong? This is a more complicated question than it might at first appear and deserves examination on at least two separate bases that warrant more careful consideration.

In the West, at least when I was a child in the ’60s, some of the most widely learned fairy tales involved the manipulative invocation of false or trumped-up threats. The most famous of these, of course, is “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” a fable of Greek origins attributed to Aesop that dates from the 6th century BCE. In tales like these, things usually don’t end well for the party doing the manipulating—or threat inflation, in the lingo of international relations theorists—and it’s my creeping suspicion that overuse of China as a motivating factor or justification for just about whatever crosses the minds of the American political class also risks losing its potency the more routine it becomes.

Invocations of China as a summons to a restoration of American greatness have been coming fast and furious under Biden, who has also repeatedly wielded the specter of Chinese power to justify his policy priorities.

There are serious reasons to compete with China in terms of concerted national policy. Artificial intelligence—an area that requires big, long-term investments in basic science—strikes me as one such area. But to be smart about using China as a rationale for policy changes requires being extremely selective. By contrast, what does it mean to make a much broader claim such as, for example, that the Pentagon should compete with a country as large and powerful as China—a nation, moreover, which has deep and growing global interests? Should that place the United States back in John F. Kennedy-era territory, when the Soviet Union could be conjured as a threat in every quarter and the United States had to be ready, as JFK said, to “pay any price” to compete with it?

There are many good, and indeed interrelated, reasons to think otherwise. These start with a rational assessment of where America’s limited resources can best be spent, with the Biden administration wisely so far seeming to think that domestic renewal can bring far better payoff than the use or flexing of muscle overseas. Opinion polling of various sorts, meanwhile, suggests that substituting China for the wolf in Aesop’s fable already lacks the motivating power that some imagine. As far as China’s image has fallen with the American public under its leader Xi Jinping, there is little reason to think that Americans are eager to sign up for a competitive crusade that edges toward a new cold war with Beijing. In fact, as one poll found, competition with Europe is as potent a cause for concern among the American public as is competition with China.

The second big categorical reason to resist the impulse to try to utilize China as the motivating idea behind all manner of policies is that, by doing so, you increase the risk of getting the enemy you seek. If beating China becomes the be all and end all of American purpose, what do we imagine the impact of that will be on China and its motivations?

It is true that China has been fixated on surpassing the West, and the United States in particular, at least since Mao Zedong ruled the country. Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s capitalist successor, shared this obsession, but he is not remembered that way, and his subtlety regarding this matter is what bought his country the space, time and healthier focus it needed in order to reform itself and reset its competitive trajectory vis-à-vis the West.

Deng’s famous watchword was, “Hide your capacities and bide your time,” meaning not only that China should not speak constantly of threats or openly threaten others, but that China shouldn’t even emphasize global competition in its discourse. The maxim might be translated as, “Work hard and with purpose, and keep quiet about your ambitions and rivals.”

The United States would be well served to adopt some of this spirit today. This would entail relentless focus on getting its own house in order, not only by strengthening the country in conventional economic or national security terms, but by doubling down on making it a better place—meaning a fairer, more open and equitable society, with greatly renewed vigor for restoring a democracy more imperiled than it has been in decades. Among other things, if it can do so without the need for constantly mentioning rivals or deepening interstate enmities when they are gratuitous, the United States might find that it has much more success in winning friends and influencing people. That occurs more readily when virtues like these are taken to be real and embraced for their own reward.

The final piece in a more virtue-based approach involves finding ways to expand cooperation with China—and with more imagination and political courage, opportunities for this abound. Combating COVID-19 strikes one as the most obvious example. Why should the world care whether the United States or China is leading or winning in a public health catastrophe of this magnitude, especially when so much of the human population remains unprotected?

Space exploration is yet another. If the United States and Russia could cooperate on such an endeavor, as they did in the 1970s and 1980s, why shouldn’t Washington and Beijing? Here is a suggestion for those fond of taking the lead. The Biden administration should extend the hand of constructive partnership, and if it does so, it could find that the doors to many other possibilities begin opening. Or it can keep crying wolf and see if the fable has a happier ending this time around.

The Resurgence of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan

Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has been one of Pakistan’s deadliest militant organizations since its inception in 2007. For over a decade, the group terrorized the country with horrific attacks such as the 2014 massacre in Peshawar that killed over 150 people. And while Pakistan security forces had severely curtailed TTP’s ability to launch attacks by 2016, a recent deadly attack in Quetta suggests that the group is rebuilding. While TTP’s lethality remains low, renewed attacks and the resurgence of the Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan could potentially revitalize TTP in Pakistan and the region.

En complément à la première lettre ouverte des militaires…

Une tribune du général François Gaubert

En tant que général signataire de la lettre ouverte dite des généraux – laquelle en fait est celle de plusieurs milliers d’anciens militaires de tous grades, ce qui en fait la valeur – je souhaiterais apporter un éclairage complémentaire mais essentiel au paragraphe évoquant « l’intervention de nos camarades d’active ».